Kingdom as a doing-violence-to-it, which has been in progress since the days of the Baptist, especially as the hearers themselves do not seem to have cared, or been able, to understand what was the connexion of the coming with the violence; nor do we know why He expects them to understand how the Baptist is identical with Elias.
But the problem which became most prominent of all the new problems raised by eschatology, was the question concerning the Son of Man. It had become a dogma of theology that Jesus used the term Son of Man to veil His Messiahship; that is to say, every theologian found in this term whatever meaning he attached to the Messiahship of Jesus, the human, humble, ethical, unpolitical, unapocalyptic, or whatever other character was held to be appropriate to the orthodox "transformed" Messiahship. The Danielic Son of Man entered into the conception only so far as it could do so without endangering the other characteristics. Confronted with the Similitudes of Enoch, theologians fell back upon the expedient of assuming them to be spurious, or at least worked-over in a Christian sense in the Son of Man passages, just as the older history of dogma got rid of the Ignatian letters, of which it could make nothing, by denying their genuineness. But once the Jewish eschatology was seriously applied to the explanation of the Son of Man conception, all was changed. A new dilemma presented itself; either Jesus used the expression, and used it in a purely Jewish apocalyptic sense, or He did not use it at all.
Although Baldensperger did not state the dilemma in its full trenchancy, Hilgenfeld thought it necessary to defend Jesus against the suspicion of having borrowed His system of thought and His self-designa- tion from Jewish Apocalypses. [1] Orello Cone, too, will not admit that the expression Son of Man has only apocalyptic suggestion in the mouth of Jesus, but will have it interpreted according to Mark ii. 10 and 28, where His pure humanity is the idea which is emphasised. [2] Oort holds, more logically, that Jesus did not use it, but that the disciples took the expression from "the Gospel" and put it into the mouth of Jesus. [3]
Johannes Weiss formulated the problem clearly, and proposed that, with the exception of the two passages where Son of Man means man in general, only those should be recognised in which the significance attached to the term in Daniel and the Apocalypses is demanded by the context. By so doing he set theology a problem calculated to keep it occupied for many years. Not many indeed at first recognised the problem Charles, however, meets it
- ↑ A. Hilgenfeld, Zeitschr. f. wiss. Theol., 1888, pp. 488-498; 1892, pp. 445-464.
- ↑ Orello Cone, "Jesus' Self-designation in the Synoptic Gospels," The New World, 1893, pp. 492-518.
- ↑ H. L. Oort, Die uitdrukking o uioV tou anqrwpou in het Nieuwe Testament, (The Expression Son of Man in the New Testament.) Leyden, 1893.
